A Different Perspective on Running
I’ve recently been raving about Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run; this extended love letter to the art of running can inspire even the most lackadaisical runner to strap on a pair of shoes and get on the trail because of how strongly the author expresses the conviction that, well, we’re born to run [1]. More generally, and apart from mere inspirational purposes, the writing-about-running genre has intrigued me of late because of the poetry implicit in any description of such an awesome (in its literal sense) endeavor as long-distance running, where pushing bodily limits, testing human will, and forcing unyielding dedication upon oneself are routine and necessary [2].
So it’s no surprise that I spared little hesitation in reading John L. Parker’s Once a Runner as soon as I heard about it. The fiction, apparently a cult classic and required reading among competitive runners, is hailed by Runner’s World as “the best novel about running ever written”, and does not disappoint [3]. This page-long excerpt shares the competitive runner’s perspective, that of someone who doesn’t run because of any deeper meaning to be found in the act, but rather because it’s the only meaning there is. Spiritual, material, worldly aspirations dissolved and manifested in pursuit of physical perfection— beautiful.
“Cassidy sought no euphoric interludes. They came, when they did, quite naturally and he was content to enjoy them privately. He ran not for crypto-religious reasons, but to win races, to cover ground fast. Not only to be better than his fellows, but better than himself. To be faster by a tenth of a second, by an inch, by two feet or two yards, than he had been the week or year before. He sought to conquer the physical limitations placed upon him by a three-dimensional world (and if Time is the fourth dimension, that too was his province). If he could conquer the weakness, the cowardice in himself, he would not worry about the rest; it would come. Training was a rite of purification; from it came speed, strength. Racing was a rite of death; from it came knowledge. Such rites demand, if they are to be meaningful at all, a certain amount of time spent precisely on the Red Line, where you can lean over the manicured putting green at the edge of the precipice and see exactly nothing.
Anything else that comes out of that process was by-product. Certain compliments and observations made him uneasy; he explained that he was just a runner; an athlete, really, with an absurdly difficult task. He was not a health nut, was not out to mold himself a stylishly slim body. He did not live on nuts and berries; if the furnace was hot enough, anything would burn, even Big Macs. He listened carefully to his body and heeded strange requests. Like a pregnant woman, he sometimes sought artichoke hearts, pickled beets, smoked oysters. His daily toil was arduous; satisfying on the whole, but not the bounding, joyous nature romp described in the magazines. Other runners, real runners, understood it quite well.
Quenton Cassidy knew what the mystic-runners, the joggers, the runner-poets, the Zen runners, and others of their ilk were talking about. But he also knew that their euphoric selves were generally nowhere to be seen on dark, rainy mornings. They primarily wanted to talk it, not do it. Cassidy very early on understood that a true runner ran even when he didn’t feel like it, and raced when he was supposed to, without excuses and with nothing held back. He ran to win, would die in the process if necessary, and was unimpressed by those who disavowed such a base motivation. You are not allowed to renounce that which you never possessed, he thought.
The true competitive runner, simmering in his own existential juices, endured his melancholia the only way he know how: gently, together with those few others who also endured it, yet very much alone. He ran because it grounded him in basics. There was both life and death in it; it was unadulterated by media hype, trivial cares, political meddling. He suspected it kept him from that most real variety of schizophrenia that the republic was then sprouting like mushrooms on a stump.
Running to him was real; the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.”
1. The title says so!
2. It’s why I express profuse admiration for all high-caliber athletes in general; endurance athletes, though, have it the roughest and are the ones that truly get to confront the big questions of Human Body and Spirit.
3. With a blurb like that, how could it? Trust the blurb.
